Want to see me spit fire? Scatter roaches, scatter!

Information is power. Not knowledge, information. If you obtain information, THEN you have knowledge.

Some folk keep information from reaching others because it gives them power over them. On Wall Street they call this "insider information," but insider information applies to all walks of life. Who knew that instead of buying aspirin you could chew on a piece of willow bark, which contains acetyl salicylic acid, the chemical name for aspirin? The pharmaceutical company that first sold aspirin knew. They took a folk remedy, put it in pill form and kept the information about its freely-available origin a secret so they could sell the aspirin and make a profit.

[A quick aside: I did my graduate work at Louisiana State University here in Baton Rouge. Some of the sorority girls on the LSU campus, late for class and hung over, would snag bark from the willows on the quad and chew it, followed by a Coca-Cola. In short order they were pert, prim and proper and ready to continue their search for the genetically perfect, family-connected breeding partner.]

This is just an example. Other ways folk keep information from you is by editing or deleting the work of another -- religious leaders destroying volumes of works on the life of Jesus Christ to give you a Bible authored only by four fallible men is just one historical example. Book burners are intent on one thing -- ensuring that others never discover the truths they've learned. Because why? That's right, because information is power.

If I write an opinion and someone extracts my comments from that opinion, that opinion no longer is mine. It is controlled by the editor and it becomes his/her view and not mine. He/she has extracted views I espouse because he/she doesn't share those same views. Yet my name is still attached to it! This is a method of camouflaging and influencing. People see generally the same opinion espoused by a number of editorialists and opinion writers and they believe that that consensus opinion was arrived at independently. This, as you see, is not necessarily so. The mainstream press loved Clinton and hates Bush. You would think. But it's the owners of the mainstream press who loved Clinton and hate Bush, and what you read is their paid-for opinion. They buy wordsmiths like myself -- or better -- to influence you. Now some of those writers may claim it's their opinion, and in some cases that may very well be true. But not all. And they may have written the owner's opinion so many times, they have influenced themselves!

I'm not always as clear a writer as I should be. I know that. I'm imperfect. I want my writing to be clear, grammatically correct and without errors in spelling. I'm a slob in person but my writing is the public part of me and I want it to be natty. But editing for clarity, spelling and grammar is one thing -- editing for content is quite another. And it pisses me off to no end that someone would attempt to change the full context of what I write to suit themselves, especially when they hide themselves in the shadows. What does the Bible say, something like, "If thine eye does offend thee, pluck it out." Meaning, if you don't like what you see, don't look.

In recent weeks, this has happened to me twice, once on the Ultimate Subaru Message Board and then again on the consumer comment forums of Woot. They didn't like what I wrote, deleted it or edited the content to change the context. And in both cases, the editing/deleting was done in the shadows. None of the sneaky bums would admit who it was who was editing and deleting my posts. Cockroaches, you see, hide when the lights are on. Their power exists only in secrecy, in the non-disclosure of the truth. They fear that someone will find out that the Wizard of Oz is a fat man from Kansas with a small mind filled with paranoia and fears. As a result, I've been banned from posting to the Woot.com consumer comment forums -- they'll receive no more of my money -- and I make the personal decision to no longer financially support usmb.net. Tinpot dictators will always fall -- sic semper tyrannis.

The power of the press belongs to those who own the press, and this one's mine. That click you hear is the sound of a light switch being flipped. Scatter roaches, scatter!